Tradition of Deceit Read Online Free PDF Page B

Either would be glorious.
    Although she purposefully stood with her back to the bridge, she sensed the sightseers high above her. The city’s well-to-do often promenaded to the bridge to literally look down on the immigrants making their home on the low tableland cradled by a bend in the river. Magdalena knew that if she did peek, she’d be able to make out the silhouettes of parasols against the setting sun—and hats.
    She smoothed the kerchief knotted beneath her chin. She’d covered her hair this way back in central Poland, and on the ship across the Atlantic, not yet knowing that her black headscarf would represent her otherness . She lived in the community the Yankees called the Cabbage Patch, or Little Connemara, or Bohemian Flats. Magdalena suspected that the Yankee women up there knew very little about the Flats. She’d never seen anyone wearing a stylish bustle dress actually descend the seventy-nine steps that separated the Flats from the rest of Minneapolis. She only knew about the nicknames because the weary men who ate and slept at her boardinghouse told her.
    â€œMama?”
    Magdalena turned and felt the sun rise in her heart. “Yes, Frania?” She’d named her daughter Franciszka, but the diminutive endearment was sweeter.
    The four-year-old on the bank pointed proudly to a small pile of sticks nearby. “See?”
    â€œGood girl,” Magdalena called. “Keep looking, all right? I need to wait a little longer. We’re almost out of firewood.” And food. And money. But—one thing at a time.
    Frania renewed her search, and Magdalena turned back to the river. The evening smelled of muck and wood smoke. The last feeble rays of spring sunshine slipped away from the worn wool shawl knotted over her shoulders. She should head to the boardinghouse soon; she wanted to make soup for the men trudging down from the flour mills. But she’d let her woodpile get dangerously low, and she needed to salvage one good log before heading home.
    Life had been easier when her brother Dariusz was alive. They’d immigrated together, among the first Russian Poles to settle in Minneapolis. She’d considered his ill-suppressed disgust about her swelling belly the price for her escape—from the clacking tongues in their tiny village, from the disappointment in her mother’s eyes, from the sharp words of rejection from the boy she’d expected to marry. Most of all she needed to escape her father’s brother, with his sour-beer breath and grabbing hands and boots caked with pig manure. He’d left those boots on when, three weeks before her fifteenth birthday, he’d shoved her down in the straw stack and jerked his trousers to his knees, grunting like one of his boars. Three months later, she knew the life she’d planned was gone. When Dariusz suggested they emigrate, she’d agreed at once.
    After the grueling trip, she and Dariusz had settled here in the Flats and moved into an abandoned shack right on the Mississippi. Dariusz found work in one of the lumber mills by St. Anthony Falls. Magdalena had scrubbed the shanty and declared it open for boarders, eager to contribute and determined to raise well the infant who’d been born halfway across the ocean. Seven weeks later, two strangers knocked on the door—the Irish foreman from the lumber mill and a Polish sawyer who understood a bit of English and tried to translate. Magdalena hadn’t understood all of their babble—and she didn’t want to—but she did grasp that her brother had been killed in a sawmill accident.
    â€œMama!” Frania pointed upriver, quivering with excitement.
    Jerked from her memories, Magdalena saw a stray log, escaped from one of the mills, floating near the shore. A couple of planks bobbed against it. Magdalena’s eyes narrowed with determination. Firewood and lumber. With enough planks she could build an addition onto their home. She was